Authors: Joby Warrick
Then, finally, it was time to make peace with the Islamists. Or, at least, with some of them.
Jordan’s kings have long sought to preserve stability in the country through an uneasy alliance with the country’s religious fundamentalists, allowing them a voice in Parliament and moving cautiously with reforms to avoid causing offense in what remained a deeply conservative tribal society. King Hussein relied on the Muslim imams in the 1960s and 1970s to help him beat back threats from Marxists and Pan-Arab nationalists. Many of these same clerics were furious
when Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, yet the king managed to maintain cordial ties with the country’s most prominent Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which he repeatedly praised as “
the backbone of the country.”
The new king would try a similar approach. A few weeks after taking office, Abdullah invited the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood to an informal meeting at his hilltop residence. The clerics arrived at the palace, a gaggle of flapping robes and wagging beards, bearing a list of complaints about mistreatment of prominent Muslim activists. They groused about media censorship and the country’s arcane election laws, which they said were tilted to prevent the group’s political candidates from winning seats in Parliament. Abdullah listened politely, and then, as the meeting wound down, he offered his visitors an unexpected gift: the government would immediately free sixteen Muslim Brotherhood activists who had been jailed following a street protest. The visitors seemed charmed, telling journalists afterward that the new king was a friend to the Islamists.
“
Your Majesty, we are with you, as one team, one body that trusts you,” the Brotherhood’s leader told Abdullah.
If only it were that simple. Despite the occasional rhetorical barb hurled at the monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood was effectively part of the Jordanian establishment. Other Islamists would not be swayed by the release of a handful of detainees, or by vague promises to broaden electoral choices. The Muslims wanted a say in running the country, even if they were divided about where they would take it.
Abdullah was willing to yield, to a point. The young king had already spoken in interviews about his intention to see Jordan become a true constitutional monarchy, headed nominally by a king but governed by a prime minister chosen by the people’s representatives in Parliament. But Abdullah’s advisers insisted that reforms should come slowly. In a country with few democratic traditions, attempting too much change too quickly could backfire, they argued. The Islamists already commanded large numbers of supporters, and they were organized, motivated, and well funded. They could easily win a popular vote, putting the country’s future in the hands of a movement whose leaders included men with a radically different vision for Jordan from that professed by the Muslim brothers.
The turbaned men seated around Abdullah’s table could be reasoned with. But there were others in Jordan and the region who held no regard for reason, in the Western sense. They could only be fought.
—
Jordan already bore deep scars from previous struggles with Islamic extremists, dating back to its earliest days as a monarchy. Some saw the very existence of the state as anathema, an attempt by colonial powers to keep Muslims divided and weak. As they saw it, Jordan’s royal family, the Hashemites—rulers of the holy city of Mecca for nine hundred years—had played a role in the betrayal.
It is true that no country called Jordan existed—and, likewise, no group of people called Jordanians—until the early twentieth century. For a thousand years, the arid lands east of the Jordan River were part of Islamic empires, or caliphates, that at times extended from North Africa to the Balkans and encompassed all of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. The first caliphs, who were viewed as successors to the Prophet Muhammad, ruled from Damascus and Baghdad. They were supplanted in time by the Ottoman Turks, who expanded the Islamic Empire and established an Ottoman Caliphate under the supervision of powerful sultans in Istanbul. The Turkish conquerors permitted limited self-rule in Mecca, allowing the Hashemites to retain control of the city’s holy sites in a tradition dating back to the tenth century. Then, early in the twentieth century, came a Hashemite whose ambition and audacity would alter the family’s destiny and redraw the boundaries of the Middle East.
Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the seventy-eighth emir of Mecca and the great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein, came to power as the Ottomans were lurching toward collapse. After the Turks sided with Germany at the outset of World War I, Sharif Hussein began secret negotiations with Britain with the aim of instigating a rebellion seeking Arab independence. In 1916, he agreed to help Britain and the Allied powers drive against the Turks in exchange for a promise of future British recognition of the new Arab-Islamic nation. Four of the sharif’s sons—Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid—would lead Arab armies in what became known as the Great Arab Revolt, at times
fighting at the side of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, later immortalized by historians and filmmakers as Lawrence of Arabia.
The Arabs were victorious, but Britain’s promises to Sharif Hussein expired even before the conflict ended. Britain and France preemptively divvied up the captured Ottoman lands into British and French protectorates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. After the war, the maps were redrawn to create entirely new states, including the kingdoms of Iraq and Syria and, on the narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a Jewish homeland that would later become Israel.
On the eastern side of the river, home to Bedouin tribes and vast deserts, the British carved out an enclave for Sharif Hussein’s third son, Abdullah I. The British had taken a small step toward honoring their promises to the ruler of Mecca, but their creation—initially called the Emirate of Transjordan, and later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—seemed a few ingredients shy of a real country. No historical precedent existed for such a country, nor was there anything resembling a national identity among the scattering of tribes who lived in the region. The new state lacked significant reserves of oil or gas, or minerals for mining, or water for agriculture. Even its emir, Abdullah, had been imported from abroad. Many political observers at the time assumed that Transjordan would quickly collapse as an autonomous state, to be absorbed by one of its larger neighbors.
The first serious threat came from the Ikhwan hordes who invaded the country in the 1920s and were finally dispatched by Saudi intervention. Then, in the late 1960s, it was Palestinian guerrillas who threatened Jordan’s sovereignty. A patchwork of militant groups, drawn from the four hundred thousand Palestinian immigrants and refugees massed in Jordan after three decades of wars, staged attacks on Jordanian troops and tried repeatedly to assassinate King Hussein. The monarch launched an offensive that became known as Black September, killing thousands of Palestinian militants and driving many more into Syria or Lebanon. Heavy clashes spilled into the largely Palestinian town of Zarqa, where the man who would become known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was then a boy of four years.
In the 1980s, it was regional unrest that threatened to spill across Jordan’s relatively peaceful borders. Thousands of Palestinian youths clashed with Israeli troops in the first intifada, or uprising, while young Jordanian men volunteered by the hundreds to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some returned to their villages and refugee camps with military skills and new ideas. A few, like Zarqawi, formed into groups and began looking for ways to continue the struggle against perceived enemies of Islam.
And yet radicals such as these were few in number, and notoriously disorganized. Like other Arab rulers, Jordan’s monarchs sought to contain the threat by fostering powerful and ruthless intelligence networks to keep the extremists in check. At the same time, they would co-opt relatively moderate Islamists by granting them positions of privilege and offering limited political freedoms. Abdullah, like his father, supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s role as a moderate opposition force in Jordan. And, like his forebears, he would look for ways to bolster the informal alliance, by granting occasional favors and concessions that would benefit the group’s leadership politically and ensure loyalty to the crown.
Just such an opportunity arose in March 1999, as the country marked the end of the official forty-day mourning period for King Hussein’s death. In a tradition dating back to Jordan’s founding, new kings are expected to declare a general amnesty in the country’s prisons, granting royal pardons to inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses or political crimes. It was a way to clean the slate and score points with important constituencies, from the Islamists to powerful East Bank tribes. To ensure the maximum political return, members of Parliament were given the task of nominating release-worthy prisoners and drafting the amnesty’s legal particulars. Their list quickly grew to five hundred names, then a thousand, then two thousand. And still lawmakers pushed for more.
A debate over the names spilled into the open. Whereas the new law excluded anyone convicted of a violent crime or terrorism, some lawmakers wanted to free dozens of detainees convicted of draft dodging or of conspiring in attacks against Israelis. Others pushed for pardons for the so-called Arab Afghans, veterans of holy war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan who had formed Islamist cells after returning home.
“
Jordan is on the threshold of a new phase of its history, which means that the government should turn a new page, especially with political detainees,” Saleh Armouti, president of Jordan’s Bar Association, told the
Jordan Times
as negotiations dragged on. But some of the country’s law-enforcement chiefs saw a disaster in the making.
“Most of them will be repeat offenders and we will see their faces again and again,” a police official complained to the same newspaper. “Most of them are thugs who will harm people when they are free.”
In the end, the list, now with more than twenty-five hundred names, was endorsed by Parliament and sent to the palace for the final approval. The king, then just six weeks into his new job and still picking his way through a three-dimensional minefield of legislative, tribal, and royal politics, faced a choice of either adopting the list or sending it back for weeks of additional debate.
He signed it.
Many months would pass before Abdullah learned that list had included certain Arab Afghans from the al-Jafr Prison whose Ikhwan-like zeal for purifying the Islamic faith should have disqualified them instantly. But by that time, the obscure jihadist named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh had become the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And there was nothing a king of Jordan could do but berate his aides in an exasperated but utterly futile pique.
“Why,” he demanded, “didn’t someone check?”
—
On the evening of March 29, 1999, a caravan of prison vehicles arrived at al-Jafr to haul away the first of the Islamist prisoners granted freedom under the royal amnesty. Under the law, the state is obliged to deliver inmates to the town where they were first arrested, so Zarqawi and his mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, took seats on the van bound for Amman. They carried their few belongings, and freshly stamped release papers that reinstated their rights as free citizens, able to work, visit, associate, and travel just as any other Jordanian citizen. The Amman van’s driver waited until dark, then eased
the vehicle through the main gate, past the guards and machine-gun nests, past the drooping, parched palm trees planted along the driveway, and finally onto the rough asphalt of the highway leading to the capital. For the first time in five years, they were free men.
But not entirely free. Both men had wives and children they barely knew, families that had scraped by during their confinement, surviving on handouts from relatives. Both were subject to continued scrutiny and even harassment from the country’s secret police. And both were bound to the Islamist brotherhood they had forged together in prison, though to differing degrees.
Maqdisi’s detachment from the other inmates had deepened during the months in al-Jafr. As the day of his release approached, he talked about returning to his family and his writing; about expanding his audience throughout the Muslim world while taking care to avoid the kind of offense that could land him back in prison.
Zarqawi, on the other hand, was torn between two families: the one in Zarqa and the one he had gained in jail. His al-Jafr brothers were a cadre of men devoted to him personally and willing to follow him anywhere. With the amnesty, the survival of this family was suddenly in doubt.
Sabha, the prison doctor, was away on the evening when Zarqawi and the others departed for Amman. The release of so many prisoners under the amnesty meant a much lighter workload, and the prison staff was abuzz with rumors that the entire facility would soon be shut down for good. The morning after the release, Sabha arrived for his shift early and stopped by the warden’s office for coffee and the latest news. Colonel Ibrahim greeted him with a strange look.
“
Our friend has come back,” he said.
The warden led the doctor through the courtyard toward the Islamists’ cell, which now held only a handful of inmates who had committed violent offenses and were ineligible for the pardon. As they approached, Sabha could see a bearded man standing at the doorway, talking to the prisoners through the bars. It was Zarqawi.
“He has been here since five-thirty this morning,” the warden said.
Zarqawi had traveled all the way to Amman, visited his mother in Zarqa for a few hours, then turned around and driven through the night in a friend’s car to arrive at al-Jafr before daybreak. Now here
he was, back inside the hated prison, ministering to other inmates like a field commander checking the morale of his troops.
Sabha watched for a moment in disbelief.
“Here,” he said afterward, “was a real leader.
“I knew at that moment that I would be hearing about him,” he said. “This man was going to end up either famous, or dead.”